Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor

Julia Gillard spent the past three years implementing a climate change policy she neither wanted nor believed in. The carbon tax was not her idea. She was doing the bidding of the Greens and independents as a condition of winning their support to form government.

And Tony Abbott was loving it. A business leader asked Abbott to reconsider his policy on climate change a little over a year ago. Would he support an emissions trading scheme so that companies could get on with the job of investing?

''I've got Gillard on the ropes and there's no way I'm going to let her off now,'' came the reply.

This Punch and Judy show that dominated Australian politics had a number of effects. One was to distract the country from developments in the physical world.

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How else do we explain the fact that Australia barely even noticed key events, such as the annual report on climate change by the World Meteorological Organisation 13 days ago?

Here's how Britain's Financial Times began its news account: ''The first 10 years of this century were the hottest in 160 years and filled with more broken temperature records than any other decade as global warming continued to accelerate, the UN's top weather agency has reported.''

In its report, the WMO said that the decade to 2010 ''was the warmest for both hemispheres and for both land and ocean surface temperatures'' since the start of modern measurement in 1850.

''The record warmth was accompanied by a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, and accelerating loss of net mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and from the world's glaciers.

''As a result of this widespread melting and the thermal expansion of sea water, global mean sea levels rose about three millimetres per year, about double the observed 20th-century trend of 1.6 mm per year. Global sea level averaged over the decade was about 20 centimetres higher than that of 1880.''

This report barely registered in Australia. Of the major daily newspapers, only The Age carried a substantive story, and even that was relegated to page 21. The Herald Sun in Melbourne carried a news brief on page 32. The only paper to run a long article on it was The Australian, which carried an 800-word opinion piece devoted to trying to dismiss its validity, written by a climate change sceptic. This is just one example of how Australia has somehow managed to lose sight of perhaps the most important single event of our time.

If you put some of the scenes of climate change distress from around the world into a movie, it'd be a blockbuster. The government of the tiny Pacific island state of Kiribati has declared a policy of orderly evacuation called ''migration with dignity'' as rising seas eat the low-lying country's habitable land; the government of India struggles to cope with almost 9 million people fleeing increasingly intense flooding.

But it happens in the real world, and we pay little heed, or, worse, pretend it's not real. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million two months ago.

This is the highest it's been for millions of years, according to ice core samples.

The people and institutions telling us what's happening, such as the WMO, are not just a handful of cranky socialists or enviro-nazis.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a respected research body funded by the federal government, issued a report in March pointing out that the defence implications of climate change were emerging much sooner than imagined: ''The 2009 Defence white paper dismissed climate change as an issue for future generations, judging that the strategic consequences wouldn't be felt before 2030. But that's no longer the case. The downstream implications of climate change are forcing Defence to become involved in mitigation and response tasks right now. Defence's workload will increase, so we need a new approach.''

Regional impacts, wrote Anthony Press, Anthony Bergin and Eliza Garnsey, ''include possible population displacement due to the effects of climate and increased conflict over resources.''

The International Energy Agency was set up by the governments of the rich countries to monitor global energy trends after the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Its chief economist, Fatih Birol, said last month he was ''very worried about the emissions trends.'' The chance of holding the global average temperature rise to the 2 degrees limit beyond which dangerous climate change is thought to occur still remained, he said, ''but it is not very great. It is becoming extremely challenging.'' He urged ''a change in political mood''.

The heartening news is that the political mood is indeed showing some signs of change. When the global climate negotiations at Copenhagen collapsed in 2009, the ugly spat between the world's two biggest carbon emitters, the US and China, was at the centre of the discord.

But in recent weeks the US and China have jointly announced new measures to reduce emissions. They are piecemeal and inadequate, but they represent a fundamental shift in political mood.

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, was sufficiently encouraged to declare that ''the world is starting to get serious about climate change. It is happening for one major reason: leadership.''

Australia already has a carbon tax, and emissions from the energy industry are falling. Hasn't Australia done enough already? Overall carbon emissions have stopped rising, but they're not falling, either.

The change of prime minister gives Australia an opportunity to reconsider.

Ultimately, Abbott's plan to use the carbon tax against Gillard succeeded, with indispensable help from Kevin Rudd. It may have succeeded too well for Abbott's comfort as Labor resurges under Rudd.

Polling to be released by the Climate Institute on Tuesday shows what its director, John Connor, calls the people's ''climate ambition emerging from the shadow of the carbon lie''.

Australia ''retreated into its shell'' as Gillard and Abbott slugged it out over the carbon tax. On Tuesday the country emerges to see what the Rudd government can do with Australia's second chance.

101 comments

This really says it all, "And Tony Abbott was loving it. A business leader asked Abbott to reconsider his policy on climate change a little over a year ago. Would he support an emissions trading scheme so that companies could get on with the job of investing?''I've got Gillard on the ropes and there's no way I'm going to let her off now,'' came the reply.

Personal and political ambition clearly outweigh any national interest for this man and his party and he are an ignorant, myopic disgrace. Political dominance is nothing but swings & roundabouts and the Abbott's, Rudd's, Gillard's, Howard's, Hawke's, Keating's etc of Australian politics all fade into history and are ultimately judged by their actions and consequential marks, good or bad, left on our society, not by their party political games. The high fives given each other at whatever cynical point scoring nonsense they believe they are succeeding at duping us by are meaningless outside of the fishbowl of their ambitions and useless to the betterment of our country and society.

Most of us are utterly fed up with the politics of negativity and hypocrisy. Climate change is real, undeniable by anybody with any level of open mindedness and a basic education and is an increasingly concerning problem. Denial will not render it a fiction and business as usual will worsen the ultimate outcome for us all. Those who shiver at refugees might ask where the many, many millions of climate refugees of the future might flee to live when water and food insecurity force them from their homes.

Abbott, and his team, are to my lengthy memory, the most shallow, unqualified and undeserving bunch of self serving wannabes in Australia's political history. For them it is but a game. Shame on them.

Commenter

Warwick

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 6:01AM

Don't worry, Tony's imaginary friend will take care of that invisible problem.

Commenter

Bruce

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 8:02AM

You waste your time pointing out that Abbott abounds in personal interest but is bankrupt in national interest, because conservatives think with their hearts and intestines rather than their heads.

They will only think that you are conducting a nasty smear campaign against Tony - as they did when Julia Gillard finally fought back with her 'i refuse to be lectured on misogyny by this man..'speech.

When Tony refused to participate in the expert committee on boat arrivals and then refused to adopt their recommendations, he demonstrated that boat arrivals don't worry him. There is no urgency about the matter. It can wait until he is in power. It was ever thus - climate change, border security, economic management - nope, doesn't interest Tony.\

Commenter

Ross

Location

MALLABULA

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 8:04AM

"Personal and political ambition clearly outweigh any national interest for this man and his party"If you need another example, consider Labor's proposed Malaysia solution of sending boat arrivals seeking assylum to the back of a Malaysian refugee queue while accepting increased numbers from the front of the queue into Australia. Clearly a policy that would have stopped boats leaving Indonesia for Australia overnight. Abbott rejected the plan saying that Malaysia were not a signatory to the Refugee Convention while hypocritically promising to turn boats around at sea to send them back to Indonesia who are also not a signatory of the the very same convention. This was a clear act of working against the good of the country that would have saved many hundreds of since drowned assylum seekers. How any of the LNP and for that matter the Greens can sleep at night is beyond me.

Commenter

Mike

Location

Central Coast

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 8:19AM

Warwick I couldn't agree more with what you have said, indeed I applaud it. This most serious global issue was hijacked by Abbott in order to serve his ambitions. The man suffers from delusions of grandeur and wants those delusions substantiated by his being elected to the highest office in the land. It's both grotesque and depressing to watch.

But we the people need to take some blame for allowing this debate to be hijacked by the LNP over such a trivial distinction as whether or not a fixed price scheme is a tax. What has happened over the past three years is politics being conducted on the basis of what the Shock Jocks and their listeners want. The educated among us should have recognised the danger of this and shouted it down long ago instead of sneering down our noses at it. The mob are a very powerful weapon if organised and used by the cunning and sinister and the only effective weapon against it is moral outrage expressed with great and unrelenting force.

Commenter

havasay

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 8:28AM

Notice this author who appears in Fairfax Media almost daily has just gotten around to mentioning the report from 13 days ago.

Suddenly climate change is front and centre after Abbott threw "invisible" egg all over his own face.

Better not hold our breath for any substantive investigation into Abbott.

Commenter

J. Fraser

Location

Queensland

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 8:34AM

Anyone considering voting for Abbott and the coalition should ask themselves this extremely important question. Can you name anything, any infrastructure the coalition has ever planned funded and built, in your electorate, or anywhere, ever? The answer is of course NO, there is nothing, so why is anyone thinking of voting for Abbott and this party of nothing, the party of spin and invisible policies? This question should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country, WHY ISNT IT?

Commenter

HFR

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 9:11AM

The carbon tax or ETS in Australia is a fraud imposed on Australia after the hype as the greatest MORAL challenge of our time. Australia's total emission is about 1.3% of the global total emission. Australia is a very high cost country.Thus if we are serious about fighting the serious global warming Australia needs to help the naughty nations China and India to reduce their CO2 emission.Actions within Australia is all about illusions and politics and getting votes.

Global warming is at best the No 1 global problem. The No 1 global problem is the fast increase in global population. Each four weeks the global population is greater than 35,000.000. Bad news China has recently closed down its population unit and moved its 500,000 workers to the Ministry of Health.This means China will reduce its one child policy and add to the exploding global population. Thus if Australia is fair dinkum and using the logic of K Rudd in global warming with actions like ETS, Australia should have a one child policy to fight global overpopulation.

If Australia is serious about fighting global warming it needs to do serious R&D in nuclear energy with China and India to make it safer and more efficient. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Australia has lots of uranium and thorium. We should stop politicians hyping and COSTING Australia heaps to gain votes from voters.

Commenter

Dr B S Goh

Location

Australian in Asia

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 9:52AM

We must not forget the nonsense spoken by Labor people on climate change, especially Mr Rudd's comments when he was here the first time. The whole subject is mangled by politicians and many journalists.

Commenter

David Morrison

Location

Blue Mountains

Date and time

July 16, 2013, 10:06AM

I find the politics of ignorance very scary. If the problem has the least complexity to it politicians run to the cheap answer, "There's no real problem". The sooner politics approaches a more rational discussion of the issues the better. Any politician who stoops to the ignorant vote will lose mine.